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CA Sells Off Arcserve Unit to Private Equity Firm

CA Technologies on Monday announced it is divesting its Arcserve backup and recovery software business to Marlin Equity Partners.

Terms of the deal, expected to close at the end of this calendar quarter, were not disclosed. The new company will retain the Arcserve name. Mike Crest, the current general manager of CA's Arcserve business, will become CEO of the new company.

Developed more than two decades ago by Cheyenne Software, which CA acquired in 1996, Arcserve has a following of enterprise customers who use it to protect mission-critical systems.

CA recently released the latest version of Arcserve Unified Data Protection (UDP), which features extended agentless protection for Hyper-V and VMware virtual environments, and is available as a single offering for Linux, Unix and Windows systems. However, the backup and recovery market has become competitive, and CA has been divesting a number of businesses since its new CEO, Mike Gregoire, took over last year.

"We are committed to providing the strategic and operational support necessary to create long-term value for Arcserve and look forward to working closely with CA Technologies through the transition," said Marlin Vice President Michael Anderson in a statement.

In a letter to partners, Chris Ross, vice president for worldwide sales for CA's data-protection business, said the move will benefit Arcserve stakeholders.

"Greater focus on company business functions, R&D and support will mean higher levels of service and customer satisfaction," Ross said. "Simply put, the new company will be purpose-built end-to-end for Arcserve's unique target customer segment, partner model and overall strategy."

About the Author

Jeffrey Schwartz is editor of Redmond magazine and also covers cloud computing for Virtualization Review's Cloud Report. In addition, he writes the Channeling the Cloud column for Redmond Channel Partner. Follow him on Twitter @JeffreySchwartz.